Here Comes People’s Republic Of America

For those of you who may have been distracted by the Independence Day weekend celebrating freedom in America, we want to report that the free-wheeling conservatives on the U.S.Supreme Court took matters into their own hands last week by piously creating the People’s Republic of America.

As Mitt Romney once insisted, “corporations are people”, it came as no surprise that this court affirmed that notion over individuals with names like Joe or Mike or Gloria or whatever identified you as a person. In the evolving language of the court, people is in, person is out. Hobby Lobby is in as a newly-recognized people; Dick Cheney is out. Besides, many wags are now referring to him as a tag line, a zombie-like creature that is neither people nor person.

A number of magnetized religious -based institutions who are horrified that the Affordable Care Act is an opportunity for workers to receive insurance coverage for contraception have now joined the legal fight to become validated in rejecting the “immorality of the pill”. Even elite academic and athletic enterprises like Notre Dame, which was once banned from the Sugar Bowl because it had a black football player, sees nothing amiss in banning contraceptives from its army of fans. If you’ve seen the polls on the Catholic majority’s rejection of their church’s bonds, we can only say, good luck on that.

Are we approaching the day when Time Magazine will name the Golden Dome in South Bend or others similarly situated, as the People of the Year? Nothing personal there, of course.

Nancy and I sat on the grass witnessing the weekend July 4th parade in Fairlawn and if anyone needed further proof of the diversity of America – persons, that is – that passed in front of us in the parade or among the witnesses, there were white folks, African-Americans, Middle Easterners who spoke my parents’ language, Latinos, Asians and women in their native Indian saris.

We would have referred to the crowd as the melting pot of America. But now that a company can be a people, where will we rank the persons at this holiday gathering?. Funny , but do you find any conflict between the notion of personhood on one hand and the denial to us as individuals of what the court explicitly favors as people? Peoplehood?